Not Applicable
1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a transportation system and more particularly to a system of highly distributed communications network of intelligent devices combined with ultra-light vehicles suspended from rails and powered by electricity usable for the transportation of people and freight. This transportation system combination creates a convenient, energy efficient, safe, and environmentally friendly method of transportation. This system is compatible and easily integrated with existing systems.
2. Discussion of Prior Art
It has often been said that Americans have a love affair with the automobile. The economic and social values of instant access to personal transit are not so much measured as ingrained in the American culture. Americans want the freedom and benefits of instant mobility that the automobile gives. They want go where they need, when they need to go, in privacy or in the company of those they choose. Americans are willing to pay in dollars and difficulties to maintain this individual mobility. This basic requirement of the American culture is measured by the fact that, on average, there is only 1.08 people per car in rush hour traffic.
Reliance on automobile transportation to provide personal mobility has raised a number of serious problems. The most serious problem results in day to day commuting. We are moving a ton to move a person. Moving a ton to commute a person to work is wasteful and has created a dependence on foreign fossil fuels. Oil embargos, such as in 1973, are a major risk to the economy. Terrorist attacks against pipelines could have a similar effect.
Moving a ton instead of moving just the person produces far more waste gases and toxins. These wasteful by-products are damaging the environment.
The roads required to support these heavy vehicles covers vast amounts of arable land with pavement. The large size of automobiles relative to the person they are conveying adds to congestion costing an estimated at $78 billion in 1999. The long construction cycles and costly maintenance of the automobile highway system adds to economic drag.
Even without the problems of using automobiles as the sole source of personal mobility, many in America""s aging population will lose their personal mobility when they lose their competency to drive.
Replacing conventional internal combustion engines with electrically powered vehicles is one solution to the current dependence on foreign countries for the fossil fuel required to power internal combustion engines. Electric vehicles have already been and are currently being developed by many major automobile companies which will be priced competitively with conventional combustion engine vehicles. Although more efficient electric vehicles will lessen the dependence on fossil fuel, replacing combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles will not solve the problem of traffic congestion in urban areas or maintain the personal mobility of older citizens.
Traditional mass transit systems include light rail and regular rail systems as well as buses. Conventional and light rail systems have become increasingly costly to construct, maintain, and operate with the result that their use for transport of freight and interurban passenger travel has been supplanted to a large degree by use of trucks and automobiles. The estimated $30-70 million cost per mile for light rail makes it difficult to getting tax payers to fund.
Traditional bus systems in which the buses operate on fixed routes have proven simply too inefficient to compete with automobile transportation. It does not meet the primary need for individual mobility. One reason for this inefficiency is that fixed bus routes are so tied to traffic that is impossible to maintain a schedule. Also, in the low-population urban and suburban areas, at least in the US, bus routes must be spaced so widely that it is so inconvenient that only those who must use the system for economic reasons actually use the system. Aside from the general inconvenience of a traditional bus system, the travel time required by such systems is commonly so high that many potential users cannot even consider using the mass transit system without changing lifestyles significantly.
There have been many attempts to make mass transit systems more efficient. A dual-mode xe2x80x9cIntelligent Auto/Transitxe2x80x9d system being studied in Denmark is known as the RUF. The RUF system utilizes individual, intelligent, electric or hybrid vehicles that are capable of running on both a conventional highway and on an electrified guideway. The guideway is passive, that is it has no moving parts. This system requires electric vehicles that have significant onboard intelligence to run driverless on the guideway, and two sets of wheels and motors: one set for conventional roadways and one set for the guideway. Although this system provides for individual transport vehicles versus mass transit vehicles, the system is costly to build at approx $7 million per mile, not including the cost of vehicles.
Another type of transit system known as Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) also utilizes a passive guideway and individual active vehicles that are occupied by from one to four passengers. Although this system includes a number of improvements over vehicles and systems presently in use, it does not provide a simple and modular architecture, and is susceptible to bottlenecks and congestion. The bottlenecks and congestion would result when the capacity of a given station is exceeded. For example, if a number of passenger vehicles arrive at a respective passenger station at the same time, the vehicles may exceed the capacity of the station so that other arriving vehicles may block the flow of vehicles on the main guideway servicing the station. The PRT system does not provide a means to prevent the capacity of a station from being exceeded by the occurrence of a number of overlapping and simultaneous arrivals of vehicles at a given station. In addition, as a plurality of vehicles arrive at a station, they must be sent back (occupied or unoccupied) onto the main guideway to enable other arrivals to be handled.
Another attempt at improving traditional mass transit is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,168,451 to Bolger. The Bolger Patent is directed to a user responsive transit system in which a city is divided into numerous transit cells. Transit requests within the individual cells are serviced by small vehicles that are automatically dispatched by a computerized controller according to the user requests. In the Bolger system, the requests are entered from special terminals located at intervals within the transit cell.
Although the user responsive transit system disclosed in the Bolger Patent represents an improvement over purely fixed route systems, the Bolger transportation system has several problems which have prevented its use. One problem is that the Bolger system requires numerous transit request terminals for transmitting service requests to the computer dispatch system. These transit request terminals are so expensive that the system would be difficult to test on any realistic scale. Furthermore, the manner in which a vehicle is dispatched is inefficient. In the system disclosed by the Bolger Patent, a vehicle is chosen for dispatch based upon the minimum added distance to service the particular request. This dispatching system invariably results in vehicle backtracking. Furthermore, during a high usage period, there are so many transit requests in a small area that a single vehicle would end up going back and forth in a small area to pick up passengers and only be allowed to continue to its dispatched destinations after an excessive period of time.
The most promising of the various transportation systems which have been proposed to date are systems employing lightweight cars or vehicles suspended from overhead monorail structures such as the type of system found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,825,291, 3,081,711, and 3,590,743 which are typical of the suspended overhead systems. However, the problem of switching the cars from one track to another presents a problem which does not appear to have been solved by such a mechanism in a satisfactory manner, although U.S. Pat. No. 3,590,743 makes an attempt at solving this problem.
The present invention is distinguished over the prior art in general, and these patents in particular by providing the required individual mobility while minimizing the moving mass of the vehicles. Instead of moving a ton to move a person, move only the person. A highly distributed network of intelligent devices provides control and safety while supporting ultra-light construction of vehicles. Suspending the vehicles under the rails further drives down the mass of the vehicles. The small size of the vehicles, rail mounting and computer controls add to safety and reduces congestion. The present invention can use alternative energy sourcesxe2x80x94wind and sunxe2x80x94to provide environmental protection to the system and supplement the electricity needed to power the transit vehicles. The ultra-light vehicles and immediate proximity of these alternative power sources to the system add to their viable use. The present invention does not require that the prospective user wait due to a predetermined schedule, nor does it require a prospective user share space with another person, unless desired. The system disclosed herein is easily dispatched from stations, users"" homes, cell phones, and PDA""s making it efficient and convenient.
The system disclosed in this patent solves the problems of moving people by tailoring a solution to moving only the person. Americans have proved a desire to adopt transit systems that are tailored to moving individual packets. FedEx and elevators are but two such examples. System disclosed in this patent is specifically tailored to meet the needs of commuters. It applies moving only the person with the capabilities of computer networks, intelligent devices, distributed communications, ultra-light rails and vehicles to create an energy efficient on-demand transportation system.
One of several objects of this invention is to tailor a transportation system to the needs of the people and/or cargo being transported using a highly distributed intelligent communication system to achieve the lowest practical energy consumption. The highly distributed intelligent network, used in this invention, is analogous to bees; each significant device in the network has specific behaviors: actions, memory, computing, and/or communications. Each significant device has capabilities to perform its task without requiring centralized control. Centralized devices accumulate information about availability from distributed devices, and inform them of future actions or changes in the nature of the system that affects their behaviors. Centralized devices allocate resources and prevent overload based on reported availability and historical demand. Unlike the PRT system which does not provide a means to prevent the capacity of a station from being exceeded by the occurrence of a number of overlapping and simultaneous arrivals of vehicles at a given station.
Creating an energy efficient transportation system is important. The Parasitic Energy Consumption (PEC) factor compares energy efficiencies of entire transportation systems. It is based on the physics that Energy=Mass times Velocity Squared, E=MV2. In a transportation system, it is nearly impossible to track the waste energy consumed by the many changes in velocities and differences in mass. The Parasitic Energy Consumption factor is a simplified technique for comparing entire systems. It recognizes the exponential aspect of the relationship between mass, velocity and energy. PEC equals the square of the moving mass of vehicles and cargo divided by the square of the mass of the cargo alone, PEC=(Moving mass)2/(Cargo mass alone)2. A score of one (1) is perfect, moving only the mass desired. The PEC of automobiles currently in use is approximately 147. An objective of this invention is to create tailored transportation networks with a PEC value less than 20. The goal is for vehicles to have a PEC value less than 5.
Another object of this invention is to provide an environmentally friendly means of transporting people and/or freight. The system herein disclosed reduces the impact that conventional internal combustion engines have on the environment. Improving the PEC value drives down the amount of waste products dumped into the environment. The small footprint of the rail system eliminates the need to pave over large areas. Eventually its is likely some of these will be built underground, turning long stretches where some roads used to be into parks.
The ultra-light vehicles radically reduce the cost of maintenance. Streaming loads across many vehicles moves as much cargo as heavy loads in a single vehicle.
Yet another object of The System disclosed is to provide a safe, convenient, and private means of public transportation. Potential users of public transportation around the world avoid mass transit because of the inconvenience of a set schedule and because they are forced to give up the privacy and relative security of a personal vehicle. The most used form of mass transportation is the elevator; you touch a button to call it, you get in, touch a button to tell it where you want to go, and you go whether there is one person or many persons. This invention works much the same way. You call the transit vehicle using a station kiosk, a cell phone, a PDA, a regular phone, or any other common device. Then you get in and touch a screen to tell it where to go and it takes you there. Age and driving capacity have no affect. There are no drunk or cell phone drivers. You do not have to wait for a predetermined schedule or for a full vehicle. You can choose to travel alone in a single user transit vehicle or you can travel with up to three others in a four person transit vehicle. Multiple vehicle can be linked to the same trip request to manage larger numbers.
An important object of this invention is to create a personal and public transportation system that is inexpensive to build and maintain, yet is easily integrated within the current transportation systems. Regular and light rail can be very costly to build. The light rail system currently being built in the Minneapolis area will cost approximately $3-4 billion for 2,800 miles and will take 4 years to build. The disclosed system costs about the same to build per mile as a two lane road, unlike the RUF system which is approximately $7 million per mile. Like the RUF system, the System herein disclosed can be built in existing right-of-ways which makes it easily integrated into existing transportation systems. The herein disclosed System, unlike the PRT system, provides a simple and modular architecture and can be built very quickly; approximately 10 miles per day per team.